Commentary on Political Economy

Monday, 16 January 2012

Apologies to our friends for the long interval between posts due to my being "in transit" both physically and intellectually with a second book, after the one on Nietzsche, this time on Max Weber that will form "chapters" in the overall compendium that I have called Krisis: Exegesis and Critique of Capitalism. As a reward for the trust our friends have confided in us (the readership is rising constantly - we have now reached 30,000 page-views!), I have decided to post this lengthy draft of Section 8 of the Weberbuch. Thanks for your support and "Happy New Year!"

PART THREE - Methodology
and Rationalisierung in Weber’s
Sociology

8

The Concept of Freiheit in Weber’s Negatives Denken

The criteria
of value which political economists have naively identified or given prominence
to have alternated between the technical economic problem of the production of
goods and the problem of their distribution ('social justice). Yet, again and
again both these criteria have been overshadowed by the recognition, in part unconscious,
but nevertheless all-dominating, that a science (Wissenschaft) concerned
with human beings - and that is what political economy is - is concerned
above all else with the quality of the human beings reared under those
economic and social conditions of existence. Here we should be on our guard
against one particular illusion: As an
explanatory and analytic science, political economy is international, but
as soon as it makes value judgements it is tied to the particularstrain
of humankind (Menschentum) we find within our own nature. (CWP,
p.15)

The German Historical School and other early opponents of
Neoclassical Theory objected to marginal utility on the ground that “utility”
is an entity whose “homogeneity” fails to account for the obvious diversity of
the “motivations” behind “economic action” which evince instead the
“heterogeneous” character of its manifestations (see Schumpeter’s account of
this in the last chapter of his Economic
Doctrines). One of the constant objections to capitalist enterprise is
precisely this – that it reduces all
aspects of human social interaction to the “homogeneous” pursuit of “profit”.
The most convenient feature of economic theories of Value (whether based on
“labor” or “utility”) is that they eliminate the need to explain how disparate
aspects of human activity can be homologated
and homogenized into a single monetary
measure in capitalist societies – something that had never happened in
previous historical formations characterized by the prominence of
incommensurable mechanical social bonds impossible to subject to the organic
fluidity of the monetary equivalent. Our purpose in this chapter is to
elucidate how such homologation and homogenisation – in short, how such a
“rationalisation” – is possible by
conducting a thoroughgoing review of Weber’s scientific methodology. Weber
himself fails to confront the central question that we are addressing here –
that is, how such a reduction of the heterogeneity of human activity to
“homogeneous” and “rationally calculable enterprise” or “profit” is at all possible! On the contrary, we have seen
that Weber worked on the presupposition of just such “homogeneity” of what he
called “modern industrial labor [Arbeit]” which he did not analyze in terms of
the reproduction of the society of capital.

In economic analysis again - as with legal, political and
other social institutions - Weber makes the colossal Neo-Kantian mistake of
assuming that there is a specific “form” of human “knowledge” or “action” that
is singularly “economic” – just as he conceded to Kelsen that there is a
specific dimension of human social activity that is “legal”. Weber simply
mistakes what are mere and highly contingent “institutions” of human groupings
– the “economy” and “value”, the “law”, “the State” and “power” – for
hypostatic and ineluctable “forms” of human knowledge that a social scientist or “observer” can analyse in
their epistemological specificity and “autonomy” from other “disciplines” or
“sciences”. This is why for Weber “as an explanatory and analytic science,
political economy is international”.
Scientific activity must be “international” because its “categories”
and “laws” cannot preserve their “scientificity” if they end up prescribing
“ultimate goals” whose ineluctably “normative value” will necessarily negate
the “neutrality” and “universality” that are indispensable to all “activity”
that pretends to be truly “scientific”. Nevertheless, no scientific activity,
as activity, can entirely extricate itself from the sphere of human action.
And this is why “as soon as it makes value judgements [the analytic
science of political economy] is tied to the particularstrain of
humankind (Menschentum) we find within our own nature”. Two are the inextricable
a-spects (the “per-spectives”) of “science” that Weber isolates, therefore: -
the “formal and technical” side, the pure or axiomatic aspect, and then
the inevitably “practical” side, the applied or practical aspect, that
is not “inter-national” and that is indeed partial and chauvinistic. Yet
it is precisely the impossibility of extricating
these a-spects of “science” from each other that will enable us to identify
and to overcome the aporetic limits
of his methodology.

This is not to say that Weber commits the fallacy of
identifying an underlying sub-stance or
“reality” (be it “labor” or “utility”) that may “explain” or help “determine”
social behaviour. Indeed, once the Weberian
Entwurf is properly understood, it will be immediately apparent how incongruous
and inapt is that entire critical and “scientific” approach to Weber’s oeuvre which
lingers exclusively on the voluntaristic
and formalistic aspects of his sociology, chief among them “charisma”, the
“ideal types” and “rationalism” – not without the complicity of Weber himself
who is in part “responsible” (this is written tongue-in-cheek) for this mis-interpretation
and mis-apprehension of his work precisely because of his repeated attempts to
preserve the “scientific autonomy” or “epistemological validity” of various
“fields” of the Geisteswissenschaften
in the Neo-Kantian tradition initiated by Hermann Cohen, which Weber pursues in
its “interpretative” or “hermeneutic” elaborations by Rickert and Dilthey in
the historical sciences, whilst at the same time prescinding from the “content”
of these “scientific fields” in line with the Machian obliteration of all
“meta-physical” concepts that might seek “to capture” the “reality” behind the
“phenomena” or “sensations” – the “facts” – of “scientific empirical research”,
particularly in the “field” of political economy.

It is not surprising, then, if the first methodological
obstacle that Weber tackles is precisely this “appropinquation” by the German
Historical School of Law, from which Weber hails, and then by its “economics”
strand with Roscher and Knies, of the “freedom of the will” and the “creative irrationality”
of its actions. Nor is it surprising that he should often flounder in the
“relativism” induced by the formalism and phenomenalism he inherits from the
Neo-Kantians and from Machism, respectively. - Because in genuine Nietzschean
fashion Weber cannot allow that the field of scientific research be “divided”,
as both German Historical Schools propose, according to their “subject-matter”, the Cartesian res, cogitans
or extensa: that is to say, either
“nature” for the “natural sciences” (Natur-wissenschaften) or “the soul” for
the “historical sciences” (Geistes-wissenschaften). For Weber as for Nietzsche
no such “transcendental” dichotomy is possible: it is not the subject-matter that determines the content of the science for the simple
reason that “science” has nothing to do with “the real course of events” but is
rather a “technique” that con-nects “rationally” means and ends. For Weber in
particular, and here begins his “distancing” from Nietzsche’s “trans-valuation
of all values”, although no “metaphysical” categorization of empirical research
of “the real course of events” is legitimate because its only ratio would be the onto-theo-logy of
Western metaphysics that seeks an “ultimate cause”, a ultima ratio or causa finalis,
or Value from which the rest of existence can “emanate” hierarchically, still it is possible “to isolate” a technical rationality that can retain
the axiomatic characteristic of
“scientific objectivity” and of “value neutrality” – aetiological rather than
deontological, empirical rather than axiological.

As we are about to show in this section, it is this Weberian
attempt to distinguish “logically” the element of “purpose” from that of
“finality” (ends and means, Zweck and Wert or Ziel) in his affirmation of the
“objectivity” of “social science” that leads him to forget or neglect the problematic of the “finality” in every
“purpose” and the “purposivity” in every “finality” that makes any “objective”
or “technical” definition of “rationality” an illusory hypostasis. The early tract
on Roscher und Knies betrays in fact
Weber’s early jurisprudential formation in that the correlation between
“freedom” and “irrationality”, the “unscientificity” of “history” as a subject-matter (recalling the a-methodon hyle [form-less matter] of
early Greek historiography) and that between “necessity” and “regularity” which
form the pars delenda of that tract
had constituted also the central tenet of Savigny and his Historical School of
Law whose theoretical premises were then adopted and adapted faithfully by the
German Historical School of Economics. Long before Weber replaced Knies at
Freiburg, this “Thucydidean” Historismus of
both German Historical Schools had been challenged by Rudolf von Jhering’s attack on the Hegelian holistic concept of Volksgeist and his application of
Windelband’s distinction between “ideographic” and “nomothetic” scientific
methods in social studies to jurisprudential history, stressing the “purpose”
(Zweck) or causa efficiens of “laws”
in serving social needs as against the “ideal aims” (Ziele) or causa finalis of “Law” as understood in
Neo-Kantian “Normativism”. (See on this
Jhering’s Der Zweck im Recht and
Windelband’s ‘Normen und Naturgesetzen’ in Praeludien,
both published in 1882-83.)

Weber’s great merit in resuming this novel assault on the
entrenched orthodoxy of the Kathedersozialisten
twenty years later consists precisely in applying Nietzsche’s revolutionary
critique of Western metaphysics and science in an original synthesis that turns
it from the “formalistic” Kantian notion indicated by its concept of
“rationality” into its “operational version” as Rationalisierung indicating the “active”, “willful” role of “the
instincts of freedom” and of “the ontogeny of thought” in the
“intellectualization” of practical historical conduct. (The name “negatives
Denken” serves to emphasize the “negative” approach to the Ratio-Ordo and the Freiheit
of the philosophia perennis, but not its converse, the “passive” approach of
the latter to the “becoming” of Being and its transformation of the operari
into opus, of facere into factum, and of
agere into actus. [Again on this, see Heidegger’s Schelling’s Essay on Freedom and Vol.2 of his Nietzsche.])

Whereas the Historical Schools seek to differentiate the
“natural sciences” capable of determining “laws” that con-nect phenomena
causally, “regularly and predictably”, from the “historical or spiritual
sciences” that can merely describe the contingent and the individual e-vents or
“happenings” (Geschehen) in their “idiosyncrasy”, Weber adopts von Jhering’s
and Windelband’s approach that establishes instead the epistemological and
methodological “continuity” and “contiguity” of all sciences in their search
for objective generalizations based on empirical
facts and reality that are never “deducible” but that rely instead on the
“falsifiability” of existing scientific generalizations. Like Nietzsche in the Gaya Scienza, Weber perceives that there
is no difference between “natural” and “historical” sciences from an
epistemological standpoint but only in terms of the practical “aim or goal”
(Ziel) or purpose (Zweck) pursued by each science – certainly not in terms of
an “ultimate truth” from which all future events may be “deduced”! Such
“deductionism” or, as Weber calls it, “emanationism”, is yet another version of
the “moral theology” of German Classical Idealism from Leibniz through Kant to
Hegel and Fichte that attempts to en-compass the whole of reality in ever more
“com-prehensive” concepts that end up having little connection with any “reality”
whatsoever! (This is, in nuce, also
the platform of Kierkegaard’s “existential” critique against Hegel’s
“essentialism”.)

Weber’s predecessor in the Chair of Political Economy at
Freiburg and head of the Young German Historical School of Economics, Karl
Knies, had based his entire classification of “science” on the impossibility of
reducing sciences dealing with “history” to the predictive status of positive
sciences dealing with nature because the former, though “con-fined” or
“bounded” by natural factors or “con-ditions”, rely nevertheless on the
“creative” and therefore “irrational” actions of human beings that are not open
to “scientific” or logico-mathematical “measurement”. To this position
disputing the “scientificity” of “the social sciences”, Weber objects as he did
with Roscher that it will never be possible to conceptualize the totality of reality in either the
“natural” or the “social” sciences because scientific research constitutes an
“infinite regressus” into reality itself, and that in any case
“mathematization” of reality cannot be the ultimate aim of science nor can it
indeed “define” scientific activity or methodology. The very fact that it is
impossible to specify with any degree of exactitude a “scientific methodology”
goes to show that scientific activity will always be “negative-regressive”, due
to the inevitable “falsifiability” of its “laws”, and that the human sciences,
even the most exact, will always be open to the “interpretation” (verstehen) of
human actions so that they too, or especially they, involve an infinite
regressus.

In this specific context, Weber opposes also in part
Windelband’s ideographic-nomothetic distinction in the sense that, given that
we are positing a single “causal chain” for each empirical inquiry, it is
incorrect then to conclude that behavior that is by definition “irrational” or
“idiosyncratic” [ideographic] for the individual case can suddenly turn
“rational” [nomothetic] for the “mass” simply by weight of its numbers! From a
“scientific” viewpoint, it matters not how many people in a social group engage
in similar conduct. Nor does it follow that “mass” behavior is “less free” or
“more rational” than that of single individuals. Rather, what matters is that
the social scientist be able to determine whether a given behavior (by
individual or by a group) adopts “means” that are “adequate” or “empirically
appropriate” to the “ends” that the individual or group have set for
themselves. In such a case, from the “scientific” standpoint, it is far more likely
that “rational” behavior is “free” – because it is “adequate” to the proposed
“goals” – than that “irrational” behavior is because the latter can be
explained only by some “co-ercion” or “con-straint” by which the behavior of
the observed agent may be influenced
that cause it to deviate from “the
rule”. It is precisely this “rule” or “ideal type” that the social “scientist”
devises as a “hypothesis” that must be submitted to “empirical verification”.

Weber draws a clear
line between “scientific research” or “facts” and “the philosophy of history”.
Because “value ideas” are both infinite and indefinite and because scientific
research is also “infinite and indefinite” – because no “final cause” or “ultima
ratio” can be found, all “evaluations” founded on “absolute values” or
“purposes” or “goals” assigned to “empirical reality”, to “the real course of
events” (which is itself “foreign to interpretation”) cannot but amount to mere
value judgements that pretend “to integrate in a nomothetic science” what is
instead “always and everywhere an aspect of the intensive infinity of
diversity”! We should note right here that this of the “in-comprehensible
totality” of a “reality” that, in any case, can be “con-ceived” as such, as a
“totality”, is a fundamental error into which Karl Jaspers will fall years
after Weber with his philosophical postulate of an “all-encompassing truth” as
an “ideal ontological goal”. Yet this is precisely
the error Weber himself commits – namely, to believe that there is a “real
course of events” and an “infinite empirical reality” or “external facts” or
“empirical facts” that can be abstracted
from the human activity that inevitably
ascribes interpretations (Nietzsche) to this “real course of events”, to
this “empirical reality!- Because
this “inevitability of interpretation” does not mean in the least that “it is
interpretations all the way down” (relativism) as Weber (and Foucault, to
invoke the ridiculous!) believe; nor does it mean that, with Marcuse, “science
is ideology”! What it means is that “science” is a human activity whose
“effectuality” or “consequences” are “practical” and have very little to do
with “neutral empirical scientific research” or “the pursuit of Truth”, but
everything to do with what Nietzsche calls “the Will to Truth”! The “facts” of
science are not a “real course of events” independent of “scientific activity”.
This “activity” is the very fact that
“scientific research” means to establish and determine! It is Weber’s attempt
to divorce human praxis from the “objectivity” of “empirical scientific
research”, from its “instrumental rationality”, that lands him in the desert of
nihilism, into that hypostatized “totality” that leads inexorably to the Ohn-macht of the philosophia perennis.

Nietzsche’s
question regarding “rationalization” was: how is it possible for human activity to become “scientific”, that is, to be
turned and, above all, to be enforced methodically and nihilistically
against human beings (from the sketch on Uber
Wahrheit und Luge to the final section on ‘Die asketische Ideale’ in Genealogie der Moral)? How can
“con-cepts” become “social reality”?
Weber instead insists on the “impossibility” of turning concepts into reality –
which is a “meta-physical” statement because it poses the “enigma” philosophisch and not praktisch for what it is, because it
re-affirms negatively Fichte’s
“projectio per hiatus irrationalem”! – except this time in the semblance of
“ideal types” that can link “rationally and scientifically” available means to
proposed ends. For this is a practical
reality, not a metaphysical conundrum or, as Weber calls it, “an enigma”. And
therefore Weber is also missing the point completely because it can easily be
argued that it is precisely in this
regard, according to this criterion and discrimenat least that the “natural sciences” are far superior to any of the
“historical sciences”, no matter how much “interpretation” we exercise in the
latter! The real point, the all-important clue to solving the “enigma”, is that
“the natural sciences”, no matter how “reliable” their “regularities and
predictions”, remain aspects of “human action” whose “object” or “domain” is
certainly not “the real course of events”, “the external or empirical facts”,
but rather their “effectuality”, their “effect” on human lives! But once
“regularity and predictability” is made the criterion and discrimen of
“scientificity”, however “negatively”, it is evident that the only way left for Weber to maintain any distinction between the various
“scientific fields” is precisely to rely on their “object”, on their “subject-matter”, which brings him back to the
“epistemological idealism” of the Neo-Kantian tradition. (One may sympathise
with Schumpeter, then, that after all the Methodenstreit
was, to roll his conclusion into a ball, “much ado about little”!) Weber himself
concedes the point, limiting himself to a timid deference to “extending
scientific research in all possible directions…”, pre-serving thus the “autonomy” of different disciplines, and avoiding
methodological squabbles over scientific boundaries.

Even more
important, by focusing on the “im-perfection” of “scientific activity” owing to
the “infinite regressus” of causation, Weber is paradoxically turning this
particular aspect of scientificity – the ability of a science “to predict”
events intensively and extensively - into the “negative” criterion and discrimen for the “scientificity” of
“science” that he wished to avoid and at the same time he is seeking to insulate or isolate “scientific
hypothesis” from human political action
by artificially separating “instrumental action” from what he calls “the
kingdom not of this world”, “the ethics of absolute values”. Indeed, so certain
and determined is Weber to impetrate this point that he is even disposed,
within strict parameters, to introduce the term “rational progress” in the
“technical” evaluation of his “wert-frei” science of “ideal types”:

One
can naturally use the term
"progress" in an absolutely non-evaluative

way
if one identifies it with the "continuation" of some

concrete
process of change viewed in isolation. But
in most cases,

the
situation is more complicated. We will review here a few cases

from
different fields, in which the entanglement with value-judgments

is
most intricate. (p.27)

The
most obvious “example”, of course, is in the deontological sphere of the
Sozialismus, and Weber turns to this with exquisite virulence:

The central
concern of the really consistent syndicalist must be

to preserve in
himself certain attitudes which seem to him to be

absolutely valuable
and sacred, as well as to induce them in others,

whenever possible.
The ultimate aim of his actions which are, indeed,

doomed in advance
to absolute failure, is to give him the subjective

certainty that
his attitudes are "genuine," i.e., have the power of
"proving"

themselves in
action and of showing that they are not mere swagger.

For this purpose,
such actions are perhaps the only means. Aside

from that — if it is consistent — its kingdom, like
that of every

"absolute value" ethics, is not of this
world. It can be shown strictly

"scientifically" that this conception of his
ideal is the only internally

consistent one and cannot be refuted by external
"facts." I think

that a service is
thereby rendered to the proponents as well as the

opponents of
syndicalism — one which they can rightly demand of

science….The
task of an ethically neutral science in the analysis of syndicalism

is
completed when it has reduced the syndicalistic standpoint to its most

rational
and internally consistent form and has empirically investigated

the
pre-conditions for its existence and its practical consequences.

Whether
one should or should not be a syndicalist can never be proved

without
reference to very definite metaphysical premises which are never

THE
MEANING OF "ETHICAL NEUTRALITY" 25

demonstrable
by science. (pp.24-5)

Because Weber defines
“rationality” procedurally as causa
efficiens and not substantively as causa
finalis, which is a “value or ethical norm”, he thinks that he can “reduce”
the assessment of “rationality” to a purely “technical” question, that he can
reduce the bourgeois ethos to an eidos. But in terms of causae efficientes it is evident that
these can be assessed or judged to be “rational” only in terms of that
“teleology”, of that “freedomof the will”, of that “subjectivity” or
“value judgements or ethical norms” and of that causa finalis that Weber seeks to e-liminate but without which his
purported “interpretation” of the causa
efficiens or “purposive rationality” could lay no claim to any “rational” status whatsoever! It is in
this “methodological” ocean that Weber sinks because he seeks to anchor his concept of “rationality” to a
“necessity” or “purpose” that does not and cannot ex-sist in “reality” outside of its being a dira necessitas or ultima ratio – that is to say, a politically-enforced “co-action”,
asHobbes and then Nietzsche clearly
perceived (although each drew very different socio-theoretical and
philosophical conclusions). Weber
wants to eliminate the (ethical or value or normative) “finality” in the
“purpose” of “rationality” by distinguishing neatly between Zweck- and
Wert-rationalitat. Yet by so doing he ends up eliminating any “rationality”
that the “purpose” might have, whether instrumental (Zweck-rationalitat) as causa (!) efficiens – because no
“causality” can be established
“empirically” between disparate events except in a
“rational-teleological” sense that Weber does not accept methodologically -, or
normative (Wert-rationalitat) as causa
finalis – because, ex hypothesi,
Weber correctly excludes this as “emanationism”. Thus, by eliminating any
notion of “substantive rationality” of the “purpose”, with its “causality”, he
eliminates any and all “purposivity” that the conduct under investigation
(Untersuchung) may possess as well! What Weber fails totally to see is that
“rationality” is always and everywhere a
“value judgement” with “ethical” and “normative” qualities that are present
regardless of how distant in the
causal chain the “purpose” or “instrument” of that “rationality” is from its
“final cause”! And even when he sees
this, he still clings ultimately to a notion of “scientificity”, of wert-frei or “value-neutral” science
that, unbeknownst to him and as we will demonstrate shortly, turns out to be a
Wittgensteinian “language game”.

By seeking to trans-late the Rationalisierung into
“scientific rationality”, Weber ends up tra-ducing both! As Schopenhauer showed
in his critique of Kant’s synthetic a priori judgements, either we
adopt the Leibnizian Principle of Sufficient Reason and attribute no ratio essendi to phenomena outside of
their mere ec-sistence (they are only “representations” to him
[Vorstellungen]), and so these become an inert
“real course of events” (the equivalent of Kant’s thing-in-itself); or else we attribute a ratio essendi that is identical with the
ratio cognoscendi, which is what Kant
did by attributing (arbitrarily) a
theo-logically or trans-scendentally “necessary” causal con-nection to the phenomena
that we experience. Weber falls into Kant’s confusion by seeking to retain the
“quality” of “rationality” – its “Value”, its “Norm”, its Ratio, its Sollen or “Ought” - whilst confining his
“objectivity” to a finite segment of the causal chain that he decrees to be the Sein, the “Is”! By so doing, he confuses the “practical distance”,
the causal regression, of the “rational chain” from the “ultima ratio”, with
the “causa finalis”, the causa sui (God) that is toto genere different from the “chain of events”, and that alone can confer “rational” status to
that chain! In a way, the confusion is made excusable by the fact that “ultima”
and “finalis” can be used both as “last” [in time] and “paramount” [in value]
(the way principium stands for both
“start” or “beginning” [in time] and “principle” [in value]). (Similarly,
Habermas in his attempts to establish a “theory of communicative competence or
action” engaged in an utterly futile exercise that can have no “cognitive” or
“scientific” basis – that cannot be prescribed
[recall Schopenhauer’s “where is it written”?] – in terms of mere
“communicative action”.)

Weber’s mistake is to believe that it is possible to
prescribe “rationally” – that is, “scientifically” – various “links” or
“con-nections” between purposive means (causa efficiens) and teleological end (causa finalis) in given historical
situations. This may be plausible from a “practical” point of view, of course;
but such a methodology has nothing to do with the evaluation of the
“conditions” that limit the sphere of choice of particular courses of action,
an evaluation that will always and everywhere involve the practical political activity of the
“scientific observer” in defining the “rational meter” to be adopted! (One may
think here of Herbert Simons’s apoplectic stupidity with his non-sensical
notion of “bounded rationality” – “bounded” by what, if not by “the irrational”
[which includes “asymmetric information”] whose very “ex-sistence” dis-solves any “boundaries” that Simons
may arbitrarily “draw” between the two “spheres” of “rationality”, bounded and un-bounded?) The separation
is not between “empirical” or “external” facts
on one hand and “hypotheses”, “theories” or “ideal types” on the other – for
the simple reason that no “facts” or “truth” ec-sist outside of the human activity of establishing those “facts”. Again,
this is emphatically not to say that all human action is an “interpretation” –
because that statement would presume that there is some thing that requires “inter-pretation”. Instead, the act of
“inter-preting” or of “theorising” is itself a political strategy that is capable of being “rationalised”, of
being presented as “science” but that is in fact a specific political practice that needs to be confronted as
such.